Senate Judiciary Committee receives trove of Gorsuch documents

The Senate Judiciary Committee has received more than 7,000 pages of documents connected to Neil Gorsuch from the George W. Bush Presidential Library — adding to the pile of paperwork obtained by the committee that may shed more light on the Supreme Court nominee’s background before his hearing begins later this month.

The committee’s chairman, Chuck Grassley of Iowa, and California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, its top Democrat, wrote to the Bush library last month asking for documents involving Gorsuch, such as those that cover his appellate judge nomination and any emails between Gorsuch and White House staff during his tenure as principal deputy associate attorney general.

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Roughly 7,000 pages from the Bush library were uploaded Friday to the Judiciary Committee’s website.

The Justice Department handed over more than 144,000 pages of Gorsuch-related documents to the committee earlier this week, and a committee spokeswoman said Saturday that more DOJ paperwork was being made available. When the DOJ delivery was made earlier this week, a White House spokesman said more than 220,000 pages on Gorsuch have been made available to the committee and called it “one of the most transparent processes in nomination history.”

But one official said about 90,000 pages from the initial DOJ document dump are from after Gorsuch’s tenure at the Justice Department, which lasted for about one year before he was nominated to the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2006. Gorsuch’s email account had been left active after he left DOJ, the official said.

Gorsuch’s confirmation hearing will begin March 20 and is expected to last three to four days.